The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) invites all FASS alumni back to campus for Carleton’s annual Throwback weekend.

Please join us on Thursday, September 15, 2016 for a barbeque event where you will be able to reconnect with former classmates, faculty and staff in celebration of Throwback 2016.

The barbeque will be held in the Russell House Quad, followed by a guest speaker event, to be held in the Carleton University Art Gallery, presented by Dr. Brian Foss, Director of the School for Studies in Art and Culture and Professor of Art History.

Dr. Foss will present on his extensive research topic of 1920s Modernism in Montreal: The Beaver Hall Group.

Foss has spent the bulk of the last decade researching an unsung, but instrumental collective of Canadian artists known as the Beaver Hall Group (http://www.mbam.qc.ca/en/exhibitions/past/the-beaver-hall-group/).

Professor Foss’s tenacious research culminated last fall in an exhibition for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts titled 1920s Modernism in Montreal: The Beaver Hall Group, which contains nearly 200 paintings, sculptures, drawings and miscellaneous objects borrowed from approximately 30 public and 42 private collections scattered across the country. Foss followed the lead of the primary curator of the show, Jacques Des Rochers, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Curator of Quebec and Canadian Art before 1945. Their teamwork paid tremendous dividends.

The Beaver Hall Group was a diverse assortment of like-minded Montreal based artists, many of whom shared a studio and exhibition space on the city’s Beaver Hall Hill in the early 1920s. Like Toronto’s celebrated Group of Seven, the Beaver Hall Group offered a creative portrayal of life in Canada, but they did so in a very different way. “Unlike the Group of Seven’s vast interpretations of Canada’s natural, unblemished backdrops, Beaver Hall Group art featured portraits of contemporary Canadian individuals, rural life and urbanized, populated cityscapes,” explained Foss.

1920s Modernism in Montreal: The Beaver Hall Group opened in October 2015 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and ran until January 31, 2016. The exhibition is currently on a cross country tour that includes the Art Gallery of Hamilton, followed by a stop at the Art Gallery of Windsor, and then at the Glenbow Museum (Calgary).

The exhibition has been widely reviewed, including in the Globe and Mail, Le Devoir, the Montreal Gazette and CBC Radio’s The Sunday Edition, which broadcast a documentary on the Beaver Hall Group and the exhibition (https://carleton.ca/fass/2016/art-history-brian-foss-featured-cbc-documentary-beaver-hall-group/).

The catalogue has won the 2016 Melva J. Dwyer Award, given annually by the Art Libraries Society of North America in recognition of exceptional reference or research tools relating to Canadian art and architecture.

Read more: http://carleton.ca/fass/2016/remembering-the-beaver-hall-group